le cabin in the ravine where Moya sat
and moaned, and stretched her arms all day for the dear brown head she
had last seen stained with the salt water and matted with the
seaweeds. At night she went out, and wandered moon-struck by the black
cliffs, and cried out for Patrick, while the shrilling gusts of wind
blew her pale hair about her, and scourged her fevered face with the
sea salt and the sharp hail.

One night a great wave broke over Achill. None had seen it coming,
with great crawling leaps like a serpent, but at dead of night it
leaped the land, and hissed on the cottage hearths and weltered gray
about the mud floors. The next day broke on ruin in Achill. The bits
of fields were washed away, the little mountain sheep were drowned,
the cabins were flung in ruined heaps; but the day was fair and sunny,
as if the elements were tired of the havoc they had wrought and were
minded to be in a good humour. There was not a boat on the Island but
had been battered and torn by the rocks. People had to take their
heads out of their hands, and stand up from their brooding, or this
wanton mischief would cost them their dear lives, for the poor
resources of the Island had given out, and the Islanders were in grips
with starvation.

No one thought of Moya Lavelle in her lonely cabin in the ravine. None
knew of the feverish vigils in those wild nights. But a day or two
later the sea washed her on a stretch of beach to the very doors of a
few straggling cabins dotted here and there beyond the irregular
village. She had been carried out to sea that night, but the sea,
though it had snatched her to itself, had not battered and bruised
her. She lay there, indeed, like that blessed Restituta, whom, for her
faith, the tyrant sent bound on a rotting hulk, with the outward tide
from Carthage, to die on the untracked ocean. She lay like a child
smiling in dreams, all her long silver hair about her, and her wide
eyes gazing with no such horror, as of one who meets a violent death.
Those who found her so wept to behold her.

They carried her to her cottage in the ravine, and waked her. Even in
Achill they omit no funeral ceremony. They dressed her in white and
put a cross in her hand, and about her face on the pillow they set the
sea-pinks from her little garden, and some of the coloured seaweeds
she had loved to gather. They lit candles at her head and feet, and
the women watched with her all day, and at night the men came in, and
the